Defense, Military, & Security Systems Modeling

Government agencies, departments, and consultants working with the government are discovering simulation is an indispensable tool to help guide them to the best decisions. And ExtendSim has been there to help them every step of the way.

The Naval Postgraduate School uses ExtendSim to educate and train students on the value of modeling and simulation for military use. It's being used for acquisition of supplies, risk assessment, mission analysis, PTSD healthcare delivery, UAV swarm risk assessment, and more.

Battelle, in conjunction with the Center for Disease Control, developed a discrete event simulation model using ExtendSim to evaluate how retail pharmacies affect the influenza vaccine administration capacities in a pandemic.

Because of its capability to accurately represent processes, ExtendSim was selected by the United States Navy's logistics and sustainment operations to build a supply chain management model addressing gaps in parts support for their new modular design ships. Simulation results indicated that adapting their existing system would be less costly and have lower risk than constructing a new system.

A consultant for a branch of the US Military is using ExtendSim to build inventory and reliability models of the frequency of failure of parts on military aircraft. Once a part has failed, how does it get replaced and will the replacement part be in inventory or not? And if the aircraft is out of service, will there be another one to replace it?

DNV GL used ExtendSim to model an airport security checkpoint to analyze its function when the airport was at full capacity. Using data they acquired through video and analysis, they were able to improve the security system based on knowledge of discovering its bottlenecks. They proposed solutions for managing increased capacity which were successfully tested in the simulation model.

Lockheed Martin created an ExtendSim model for the Stennis Space Center that estimates the cost of testing rocket engines.

ExtendSim is used at numerous aerospace companies like TRW on programs modeling satellites and mission data processing. One particular model simulates more than 3 terabytes of weather sensor data collected by satellites, transmitted to ground stations, and processed into science products.

The Aircraft Repair and Supply Center in North Carolina plays a unique role in US Coast Guard Aviation by supporting the entire Coast Guard with depot level maintenance and supply support. The HH-65 helicopters conduct missions of search and rescue, enforcement of laws and treaties, including drug interdiction, polar ice breaking, marine environmental protection including pollution control, and military readiness so it is imperative these copters are always on the ready. ExtendSim was used to model the repair and replacement cycle of the HH-65's main gear box. Results suggested process changes to help the Repair Division meet the fleet demand for gear boxes.

Fleets of cargo aircraft in a major war scenario were modeled in ExtendSim to minimize risk to aircraft and personnel.

An ExtendSim model aided a defense agency to identify choke points accurately and take corrective actions. This work helped increase creditability in aircrew training.

A consultant for a large defense contractor modeled a training continuum, results of which were one of the important inputs into convincing a customer that changing the training would result in increased throughput, performance, and efficiencies. This led to the customer to agree to a changed training continuum resulting in a significant scope increase for the consulting agency.

The Canadian Army uses ExtendSim for military logistics and supply chain management.

Airport Security Agencies evaluate the effects on passenger flow of new airport security checkpoint equipment and procedures with ExtendSim.

The United States Marine Corps' dependence on fossil fuel leaves logistics fuel support and supply lines vulnerable to attack. Using a specific ship-to-shore vignette, factors were identified and a design of experiments (DOE) analysis was conducted in ExtendSim to assess changes to doctrine, aircraft materiel solution, and environmental conditions that would provide a positive impact on energy efficiency while maintaining or improving operational effectiveness.

A defense agency simulated fleets of cargo aircraft in a major war scenario to minimize risk to aircraft and personnel.

Troop and vehicle movement within a new ship design were modeled in ExtendSim to see how long it would take to outfit and deploy a landing force with their vehicles.

KLSS built a Depot Process Model for The Boeing Corporation to simulate a wide variety of maintenance depot setups and configurations, starting from the same generic model. The model processes and logically controls the movement of vehicles through a depot according to variable task requirements and the availability of resources (personnel, support equipment, parts, and physical space). As data from an actual depot operation is applied to the model, it assists with the identification of process improvement opportunities which will improve vehicle throughput capacity and platform (tank, aircraft, etc.) availability.

IMEASURE has become an important tool in providing DoD sponsors with timely, high-quality estimates of life-cycle costs early in an aircraft’s development phase. It has been successfully applied in studies of advanced tactical aircraft, such as the Joint Strike Fighter and the F-22A, and in analyses of the upgraded UH-1 helicopter, the proposed unmanned combat air vehicle, and alternative designs for a new bomber.

Between 1984 and 2006, 36 out of the 136 systems that underwent operational test and evaluation (OT&E) were evaluated as unsuitable. In light of this high proportion, in October 2006 the Director, Operational Test and Evaluation, commissioned a study from the Institute for Defense Analyses (IDA) to answer the following two questions:

When a system is found to be operationally unsuitable, what are the associated costs?

To what extent can such costs be avoided by addressing unsuitability issues during the System Development and Demonstration (SDD) phase?

Using a small, selected set of Department of Defense acquisition program case studies, the IDA examined three major aircraft plafroms that addressed substandard reliability in different programmatic phases. Using the IMEASURE model and other tools, IDA identified additional resources devoted to improving reliability, the resulting change in reliability, and the corresponding reduction in return.

This paper examines the need for a UAV Swarm Risk Assessment Tool and how it can assist the Navy’s decision makers in assessing risk of UAV swarm threats in littoral environments near potentially hostile countries, based on the latest intelligence. Human-centered design principles help determine the needs of experienced battle commanders. These needs form the basis of requirements and functional analysis. The system design concept consists of several parts: discrete-event simulation of UAV swarm attacks using ExtendSim, statistical analysis of the simulation data using Minitab, and a graphical user interface (GUI) that evolved as a web-app prototype written in MATLAB. Data from the simulation is analyzed and used to generate equations that calculate the effect of critical factors: physical environment, number of UAVs, distance from land, and the ship’s defensive weapons. The GUI uses these equations to provide users with the capability to vary those critical factors and analyze different courses of action and risk. The physical GUI web-app can be used as-is, tailored or expanded. The paper concludes with an analysis of the actual GUI prototype built for UAV swarm risk assessment and how it meets user needs.

The Navy requires a capability for effective and efficient entry control for restricted areas that house critical assets. This thesis describes an Advanced Restricted Area Entry Control System (ARAECS) to meet this requirement. System requirements were obtained from existing governing documentation as well as stakeholder inputs. A functional architecture was developed and then modeled using the Imagine That Inc. ExtendSim tool. Factors affecting ARAECS operation were binned into physical, technology, Concept of Operations (CONOPS), and noise. An Overall Measure of Effectiveness was developed and a Design of Experiments (DOE) was conducted to measure the affects of these factors on ARAECS performance. The two main drivers were minimizing security violations while also maximizing personnel and vehicle throughput. Based on the modeling, an architecture was selected that best met system objectives—this architecture relied on the ability to pre-screen 40% of the workforce based on security clearance and thus subject them to reduced random screening. The architecture was documented using the Vitech CORE tool, and use cases were developed and documented. A test and evaluation plan was developed and discussed. Risk was then examined, including technical, schedule, and cost risks.

The Marine Corps must prepare itself to operate without the benefit of readily available fossil fuels and supplies shipped in by trucks or home-based supply lines. As demonstrated in the current conflicts, the threats of IEDs and the expenses of obtaining fossils fuels make it imperative that the Marine Expeditionary Brigade (MEB) of the future must be able to bring its supplies with them or have them delivered by readily available and close-by alternate means. The team chose to build a stochastic model of the notional MEB architecture framework in ExtendSim to research tradeoffs to reduce fuel consumption, while still maintaining mission effectiveness. It was documented that fuel savings are directly proportional to the Seabase distance and sea state effects during operations, which may not always be able to be influenced by the landing force. The model validates planning considerations with respect to SSD and sea state offering statistical evidence to support a recommendation that these two factors should be minimized when practical to gain best efficiencies when conducting the assault.

Go to Calhoun to see more research being carried out by the Naval Postgraduate School.

CTC developed the Total Life Cycle Systems Management (TLCSM) ExtendSim Logistics Analyzer (TESLA) Discrete Event Simulation tool. This tool enables rapid prototyping of life cycle sustainment models, providing both a strong foundation and the flexibility to adapt the model to many specific questions regarding reliability, availability, maintainability, and cost metrics. Originally built to analyze MRAP vehicle fleet throughout the remainder of its life cycle, the tool has been extended to additional analyses including Business Case Analyses for Program Manager, Engineer Systems and Prognostic Forecasting for the Army Material Command’s Condition Based Maintenance directorate.

Since implementation of the new tool, CTC’s analysts have maintained involvement with the Naval Postgraduate School’s Simulation Experiments and Efficient Designs (SEED) Center, enabling them to employ the state-of-the-art in experimental design and analysis of simulation output.

Modeling the proposed NHIN system design so the actual configuration will have the expected and desirable properties. This approach helps limit wasted programming or deployment resources by detecting and fixing robustness, security, flexibility, safety, or reliability faults early in the design and configuration process. Note, ironically, this model is an adaptation of a model originally configured for potential defense applications.

In a strategic effort to prioritize enforcement and removal operations toward criminal aliens (those individuals illegally present in US with a criminal conviction), Booz Allen Hamilton began supporting Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE). Booz Allen’s implementation of analytics spanned three years and involved developing a set of models used to solve challenging problems such as forecasting the number of criminal illegal aliens, optimizing a technology deployment schedule, and minimizing the transportation costs of removal. The impact of the work resulted in a doubling of criminal alien removals, leading to greater public safety for the American people.

In addition, this Booz Allen project, “Enhancing Immigration Enforcement with Decision Analytics” won the Institute for Operations Research and the Management Sciences’ (INFORMS) inaugural Innovation in Analytics Award in 2011.

The United States Air Force, in accordance with the Department of Defense's mission to modernize its processes, systems, and information flows, began an effort to replace legacy systems with two Enterprise Resource Planning (ERP) systems. Nova Technology Solutions (NovaTech), an Information Technology (IT) and Analytics firm, recognized the Air Force's need for a repeatable, reliable, tool to aid decision making during the planning, installation, and sustainment of these ERP systems, thus proposing the use of modeling and simulation.

ExtendSim was used to create a simple simulation model to analyze the impact of ERP increased workload on network performance by simulating the flow of data packets, specifically at the Air Force Service Delivery Points (SDPs). Results showed a 15% increase in current workload (or current network traffic) will cause a 250% increase in end-user response time (Fitzgerald & Harper, 2008).

The Department of Homeland Security (DHS) commissioned the MITRE Corporation to create an agent-based DES model of airport defense and security systems. Attacker and defense behavior at the airport environment are modeled using two intelligent agents with decision making and learning capabilities. The model simulates the performance of the airport defense against threat vectors (path-weapon combinations) so security can continuously and rapidly adapt to shifting threats.

KLSS developed the net-centric logistics (NCL) land platform model using ExtendSim. This simulation of the logistics of an U.S. Army’s battlefield includes all of the platforms, personnel, logistics, and supplies needed to support a heavy armor company. The model specifically includes spare vehicle parts as well as commodities (food, fuel, water, ammunition). It enables the customer to determine the benefits and explore the implementation of NCL concepts during a wartime deployment. The model also allows for the identification of potential logistics bottlenecks and the measurement of a unit’s platform availability and resource consumption.,/span>

RAND Corporation uses ExtendSim to identify new equipment and maintenance strategies that have the potential to enable the Army to reduce the cost of equipment and maintain its Combat Support Hospitals at fully modernized levels, providing them with equipment that is newer and in better condition.

Boeing and the Naval Postgraduate School (NPS) developed an ExtendSim model of an organizational concept called Standing Joint Forces HQ (SJFHQ) being developed at the US Joint Forces Command (JFCOM). The modeling objective was to measure personnel utilization and organizational process efficiency. Here is the NPS final report and an abbreviated presentation given at a public command and control conference. The final report contains a lot of information about the actual ExtendSim model developed.

Since 1998, the SRA Adroit C4ISR Center has provided systems engineering and technical assistance (SETA) support to the Air Staff and the Air Force Intelligence, Surveillance and Reconnaissance (ISR) Agency to help plan and manage the Air Force DCGS Enterprise. This includes the one-of-a-kind Process, Exploit, Disseminate System (PEDS) model developed and sustained by SRA. PEDS is a fully executable model of the Air Force DCGS enterprise that can analyze various reconnaissance data flows, communications capacities, ground crew composition, and other key components. The Air Force has used PEDS to support planning of DCGS involvement in Air Force ISR operations in both Operation Enduring Freedom (OEF) and Operation Iraqi Freedom (OIF).

The Boeing Advanced Logistics Analysis Capabilities Environment (BALANCE) modeling simulation architecture (United States Patent 9372917) was developed in ExtendSim to enable accurate, highly user configurable simulations of complex multi-echelon, multi-part indenture supply chain networks, including sub-assembly and refurbishment. BALANCE provides a standardized, reusable supply chain modeling toolset to support inventory management assessment, performance-based logistics contracts risk assessment, and manufacturing schedule risk assessment. It meets a need for a supply chain and logistics modeling capability that can be applied across a wide spectrum of domains, provides detailed output at the individual supply level, can interface to other logistics and performance analysis tools, can accommodate insertion of custom tailored sub-models for modeling detailed system operations and demand occurrence, and is based on standard commercially available software.

A SlideShare presentation created by Dr. Jeffrey Strickland for the Missile Defense Agency Directorate of Modeling and Simulation Verification, Validation, and Accreditation describing discrete event simulation using ExtendSim.